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Danish City First To Test Return System For Reusable Coffee Cups

Posted on February 7, 2024 by dishanth

The Danish city of Aarhus launched a three-year trial program to curve down the number of disposable coffee cups where locals can use a deposit system for reusable takeaway packages.

Like in other Nordic and Central European countries, in Denmark deposit system where one receives back money one pays when purchasing a plastic bottles or cans is already in place

The project that focused on eliminating disposable cups trash is the result of a collaboration between the Municipality of Aarhus and the recycling company TOMRA which already provides other waste collection services to the city.

For a year and a half in 2022, the company All In On Green’s robotic arm SeaProtectorOne deployed in the water, collected over 100,000 disposable glasses from the city’s river Å – from which the city derived its name – demonstrating a huge level of plastic pollution in the city.

”Aarhus must be greener and more sustainable, and Aarhus must be a city where we have the courage to test new solutions.” said Nicolaj Bang, Aarhus’ councillor for technology and environment in a press release. “We use enormous amounts of takeaway packaging in Denmark, and consumption is increasing. Therefore, it really matters if we can make it easier for both consumers and businesses to choose a more sustainable alternative to disposable packaging,” he stated.

Aarhus is the second biggest city in Denmark, counting around 336,000 inhabitants – and potential disposable cup users. The trial has been set as voluntary, but so far already 44 cafés and bars in the center of the city got interested in the project – perhaps even some frequented by King Frederik X, when he used to study at the city’s university.

Initially, 40,000 cups in two designs will be produced and around 25 deposit machines will be established in the city so that citizens can return their cups, and cash back some Danish kroner. Geir Sæther, senior vice president for circular economy at TOMRA said the company expects ‘to be able to expand the system to other types of packaging in the near future’, so to facilitate the transition from single-use to reusable packaging.

The return fee for a reused cup is just over 70 dollar cents (DKK 5) , but it is not for the money that citizens should start returning their cups: ”Recycling saves the earth’s resources and our emission of CO2. More recycling means that there is less waste that ends up as rubbish in our city and our nature,” said Bang.

This is the first city in Denmark, and the world, to carry out such city experiments, although Copenhagen had previously trialed an experimental system where pizza containers, sushi trays and coffee cups should be able to be returned in the hip area of Kødbyen, situated in a central neighborhood. Currently, Danish startup Kleen hub is experimenting in the capital with its third-generation return system based on a single bank card tap.

TOMRA’s ceo Tove Andersen said in a press release that “Aarhus shows the way to one more sustainable future, and we hope that many more cities will be inspired to do the same,”.

Cities and regional authorities have so far acted upon consumer behaviors to decrease different kinds of pollution in their cities: “These policies are quietly working because local governments are addressing climate change with communities long-term together with other challenges that people care about, like healthy diets and supporting local businesses,” said Olivier de Schutter, co-chair of the sustainable food system expert team IPES-Food.

Source Forbes

Scottish auction for offshore windfarm permits expected to raise £860m

Posted on January 18, 2022 by dishanth

Scotland’s largest-ever auction of permits to construct offshore windfarms is expected to raise up to £860m when the results are announced on Monday.

Crown Estate Scotland, which is running the auction, hopes that windfarms with as much as 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity will be built over the next decade, effectively doubling the amount of electricity generated in Scottish waters in a transition which has the potential to create tens of thousands of jobs.

The programme, known as ScotWind, has attracted frenzied interest from domestic and international bidders, and could set new records for values placed on the plots of seabed being leased for turbines.

In the first ScotWind leasing round, 8,600sq km of Scottish seabed is on offer across 15 areas, enough to develop windfarms which could power every Scottish household and save more than 6m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

The windfarms could more than double the capacity built or planned in the seabed around Scotland over the coming decade. At the moment, offshore windfarms in Scotland generate about 1GW. Projects that have received consent and those being built amount to less than 10GW.

The Moray East windfarm has become Scotland’s biggest source of renewable energy, generating up to 950 megawatts from 100 turbines. It will be overtaken by Seagreen next year with 1GW of capacity. Located around 27km off the Angus coast, the £3bn windfarm is a joint venture between Perth-based SSE Renewables (49%) and France’s TotalEnergies (51%).

The winning bids – and the prices paid – are expected to be announced at 10am on Monday. Crown Estate said in July that 74 offers had been submitted for ScotWind. Many come from consortiums.

Among them is Denmark’s largest energy company Ørsted, which pioneered the first ever offshore windfarm in 1991 and has teamed up with Italy’s Falck Renewables and the floating wind expert BlueFloat Energy.

Other bidders include renewable energy investment funds such as Australia’s Macquarie Bank Green Investment Group, which has partnered with the Scottish offshore wind developer Renewable Infrastructure Development Group; big utility companies involved in existing projects, such as SSE and Scottish Power; and large oil companies, including Shell, France’s Total, Italy’s ENI and Norway’s Equinox.

Crown Estate Scotland lifted the cap for the auction bids from £10,000 to £100,000 per sq km last year. If every bid is submitted up to that maximum cap, the sale could raise £860m.

Melanie Grimmitt, global head of energy at the law firm Pinsent Masons, said this leasing round had shown that there was significant appetite for investment from within the UK and abroad, which bodes well for a second ScotWind seabed leasing round later this year.

“This is crown state Scotland’s first seabed leasing round and marks an important chapter for Scotland’s offshore market, but with proposed windfarms from the leasing round expected to save in excess of 6m tonnes of carbon emissions, it is also an important milestone for the UK’s overall net zero commitments,” she said.

“Developers will be keeping an eye out to see if and how the application process and criteria for the next round might differ from this one given how popular and competitive it has been.”

Crown Estate Scotland is a separate organisation to the crown estate, which manages the Queen’s assets in England and Wales, and its profit is passed to the Scottish government. Some of the proceeds are expected to be ploughed into preparing the workforce for the switch from North Sea oil and gas to wind power. The transition to renewable energy means that as fossil fuel jobs disappear, thousands of workers will need retraining.

Source The Guardian

Maersk eyes ‘leapfrog’ to carbon neutral fuels in shipping

Posted on July 5, 2021 by dishanth

The Danish shipping giant is looking at ways of cutting emissions this decade, saying the industry needs to act with a “crisis mindset” in order to respond to the climate emergency.

For Maersk, this means ditching transition fuels such as liquified natural gas (LNG), which are cleaner than the heavy oil traditionally used in large vessels but are still harmful to the environment because they are made from fossil gas.

“From our perspective as a company, we believe we have to leapfrog to carbon neutral fuels for our vessels and for transportation in general,” said Morten Bo Christiansen, head of decarbonisation at Maersk.

“Any talk about so-called transition fossil fuels is simply not relevant from our perspective, it’s simply not solving the problem,” he told an online press briefing last month. “The last thing we need is another cycle of fossil fuel assets,” he added, pointing out that ships built today have an average lifetime of about 20 to 30 years and will therefore still be around in 2050.

International shipping accounts for 2.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), more than aviation’s 2% share. The IMO, a United Nations agency, has said it aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 levels by 2050.

Methanol: ‘The here and now’

Because of the urgency to cut emissions already this decade, Christiansen said the first solution Maersk can turn to is methanol, which he described as a mature technology. “And we see later also ammonia,” he added.

The problem is that methanol today is mostly made from coal or natural gas, which are both polluting, Christiansen continued. This is why Maersk is looking at green methanol made from biomass gasification, or so-called “Power-to-X” where biogenic CO2 is added to hydrogen. “And same with ammonia, made from hydrogen and then just adding nitrogen.”

The hope is that these alternative shipping fuels will gradually become greener as biomass, ammonia and hydrogen are produced in growing quantities using sustainable production methods.

“But again, the ‘here and now’ perspective is that there is actually only one solution and that’s methanol,” Christiansen said, adding there are safety aspects to ammonia that need to be solved before it can be used on a commercial scale.

Maersk is seen as a trailblazer in the shipping industry when it comes to decarbonisation. On 2 June, the Danish firm called for a carbon tax on ship fuel to encourage the transition to cleaner alternatives. The Danish firm proposed a tax of at least $450 per tonne of fuel, which works out to $150 per tonne of carbon.

Maersk CEO Soren Skou called the tax proposal “a levy to bridge the gap between the fossil fuels consumed by vessels today and greener alternatives that are currently more expensive.”

Bottleneck

The main obstacle to green shipping fuels is scale. Production is still tiny and a massive increase in volume would be needed to decarbonise the shipping industry.

That requires quickly ramping up production of renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen “because that will very soon become the bottleneck here,” said Ulrik Stridbæk, head of regulatory affairs at Ørsted, the Danish energy firm.

“So we’re trying to match this with the electrons that will hopefully start to flow from the Baltic Sea,” said Stridbæk, who cited Danish government plans to build an “energy island” off Bornholm in the Baltic Sea to harness production of offshore wind to serve the Danish and German markets.

“This is the vision,” Stridbæk said. “Producing very large scale renewable electricity, and converting it” into green hydrogen and eFuels that can be used in the maritime and aviation sector.

Last year, Danish companies – including Ørsted, Scandinavian Airlines, and Maersk – launched the Green Fuels for Denmark initiative, with the aim of ramping up the production of renewable hydrogen in the country.

The first phase, targeted for 2023, would see the construction of a 10MW electrolyser to produce renewable hydrogen to be used as fuel for buses and trucks. By 2030, the capacity would reach 1.3GW, enough to supply the creation of more than 250,000 tonnes of sustainable fuel.

Access to renewable electricity

“Clearly the constraining factor here will be the production of these fuels and the access to the renewable energy that is needed,” said Maersk’s Christiansen.

However, the cost of producing green fuels – whether methanol, ammonia, or hydrogen – is prohibitively expensive at the moment. And while demand is expected to boom in the coming years, eFuels are expected to remain more expensive than oil until the end of this decade, Christiansen said.

“A market based system, some kind of carbon price would surely level the playing field and incentivise investments into this. That is clearly something that would help and would be needed in the long term,” he said.

At EU level, the European Commission is preparing proposals to mandate a gradual incorporation of green jet fuel in aviation, with percentages increasing over the years. A certification scheme for renewable and low-carbon fuels is also under consideration as part of the revision of the EU’s renewable energy directive.

The proposal “will come with an updated set of incentives to promote the use of these fuels in various sectors,” the EU’s Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson announced in February.

The EU executive is also preparing a green fuel law for shipping – FuelEU Maritime – which is due to be published on 14 July.

A draft of that law, seen by The Guardian, has opted for a goal-based approach that would set increasingly stringent “greenhouse gas intensity targets” to be met for the energy used on board.

The result is that LNG would be eligible to power EU ships until around 2040, a prospect environmental groups described as “a disaster.”

Source EURACTIV

Denmark to build ‘first energy island’ in North Sea

Posted on February 10, 2021 by dishanth

A project to build a giant island providing enough energy for three million households has been given the green light by Denmark’s politicians.

The world’s first energy island will be as big as 18 football pitches (120,000sq m), but there are hopes to make it three times that size.

It will serve as a hub for 200 giant offshore wind turbines.

It is the biggest construction project in Danish history, costing an estimated 210bn kroner (£24bn; €28bn: $34bn).

Situated 80km (50 miles) out to sea, the artificial island would be at least half-owned by the state but partly by the private sector.

It will not just supply electricity for Danes but for other, neighbouring countries’ electricity grids too. Although those countries have not yet been detailed, Prof Jacob Ostergaard of the Technical University of Denmark told the BBC that the UK could benefit, as well as Germany or the Netherlands. Green hydrogen would also be provided for use in shipping, aviation, industry and heavy transport.

Under Denmark’s Climate Act, the country has committed to an ambitious 70% reduction in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to becoming CO2 neutral by 2050. Last December it announced it was ending all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.

Energy Minister Dan Jorgensen said the country was simply “changing the map”.

“This is gigantic,” Prof Ostergaard told the BBC. “It’s the next big step for the Danish wind turbine industry. We were leading on land, then we took the step offshore and now we are taking the step with energy islands, so it’ll keep the Danish industry in a pioneering position.”

The plan is for the island to grow from an initial 120,000 sq m in size to 460,000 sq m Source: DANISH ENERGY AGENCY

Green group Dansk Energi said that while the “dream was on the way to becoming a reality” it doubted the North Sea island would be up and running by the planned 2033 start date.

But Danish politicians across the spectrum have given their backing to the plan. Former energy minister Rasmus Helveg Petersen of the Social Liberal party said energy islands had begun “as a radical vision” but there was now a broad agreement to turn it into a reality.

A smaller energy island is already being planned off Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, to the east of mainland Denmark. Agreements have already been signed for electricity to be provided from there to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Last November the European Union announced plans for a 25-fold increase in offshore wind capacity by 2050, with a five-fold increase by 2030. Renewable energy provides around a third of the bloc’s current electricity needs:

According to the EU, offshore wind supplies a current level of 12 gigawatts
Denmark supplies 1.7 gigawatts
The new island would supply an initial 3 gigawatts, rising to 10 over time
The smaller Bornholm energy island would provide 2 gigawatts

While there is some secrecy over where the new island will be built, it is known that it will be 80km into the North Sea. Danish TV said that a Danish Energy Agency study last year had marked two areas west of the Jutland coast and that both had a relatively shallow sea depth of 26-27m.

Find out more about Denmark’s wind power:

Source BBC

Denmark just opened a huge vertical farm, and it could be a sign of things to come globally

Posted on December 16, 2020 by dishanth

When you look at a lush, green, delicious plant, you probably tend to think it comes from a fertile land somewhere in the world. Well, that might no longer be the only option out there. A vertical farm just opened up in an old warehouse without windows in Copenhagen and it expects to produce 1,000 tons of produce per year by 2021, showing that vertical farms really do have a solid future.

They won’t see the light of day or have access to soil, but hundreds of tons of lettuce, herbs, and kale (among other produce) will soon be coming out of the vertical farm. The advantage of the vertical farm is that it takes less space than a conventional crop, helping to meet the world’s food demand and producing food locally instead of importing it.

Around 37% of the earth’s landmass is used for agriculture, according to the World Bank. But climate change and conflicts can challenge the availability of land for farming, not to even mention soil erosion — one of the major environmental issues that often fly under the radar. A quarter of the world’s productive lands have already been degraded, according to the World Food Programme, challenging food security.

The project is run by YesHealth Group, a Taiwanese company with a long record developing vertical farming technology, in partnership with Nordic Harvest, a Danish start-up that wants to use technology to make food production more sustainable. YesHealth already runs in Taiwan the largest vertical farm in China.

It’s not actually a brand-new idea, as vertical farms have been around for almost a decade. They first took in Asia and the United States, which has the world’s biggest vertical farm, located in a steel mill in New Jersey and producing two million pounds of produce every year. But the idea is now also catching up in Europe.

“We offer a more sustainable way of producing food year-round, locally, without disturbing nature,” founder of Nordic Harvest, Anders Riemann, told Reuters. “We take some of the food production back into the cities where you can grow in a much smaller land and space-optimized in the height.”

The farm is installed in a 7,000 square meter hall and has 14 shelves of greens stacked up toward the ceiling in aluminum boxes. It’s all automated, with robots used to move the shelves into position and stack the produce. When fully operational, the farm will be hermetically sealed to secure the farming conditions.

Water consumption will be between 90% and 95% lower compared to traditional farming. No artificial fertilizers, pesticides, or other toxic chemicals will be used. About 200 tons of produce will be harvested in the first quarter of 2021 but this would reach 1,000 annually when the farm runs at full capacity by end of 2021.

The project also addresses one of the frequent criticism vertical farms have, the fact that they require a vast amount of electricity to provide artificial light — but for Denmark, that won’t be too big of a problem. The farm uses 20,000 specialized LEDs lightbulbs, manufactured by YesHealth, that are powered by renewable energy from Denmark’s extensive wind farms.

“A vertical farm is characterized by not harming the environment by recycling all the water and nutrition or fertilizer,” said Riemann. “In our case, we use 100% energy from windmills which makes us CO2-neutral.”

Denmark reported record-breaking wind power in 2019, covering 47% of the country’s electricity demands for the entire year. Out of the 47%, most came from onshore (29%), although offshore also generated a healthy amount (18%). The country expects to keep expanding renewables as a way to reduce its emissions.

by Fermin Koop

Source ZME Science

400,000+ Solar Co-Owners In Giant Community Solar Park Initiative In Denmark & Poland

Posted on December 7, 2020 by dishanth

A giant new community solar park initiative is going to make more than 400,000 Danes co-owners in solar parks located in Denmark (around ¾ of them) and Poland (the other ¼ or so).

This massive initiative will be the largest solar investment in Denmark’s history, totaling around DKK 4 billion ($651.5 million). It is a partnership between Danish pension fund Industriens Pension and Better Energy.

Furthermore, the initiative involves absolutely no support from the government of Denmark.

The announcement does not indicate how many solar parks will be deployed across Denmark and Poland as part of this initiative, but the total capacity is expected to be around 1 gigawatt (GW), which will actually make it one of the largest — if not the largest — such projects across the world.

As of now, 5 of the solar power parks are in operation (power capacity is not indicated), but “the majority of the parks are expected to be in operation in the course of 2021 and 2022.”

It’s a 50–50 partnership between Industriens Pension and Better Energy, and Better Energy is the one developing, building, and operating the solar parks.

“We’re extremely pleased with the investment, which we expect will secure solid, long-term returns for our members, while at the same time contributing significantly to accelerating the scale and pace of the green transition. This is the first time that solar energy has been rolled out at this scale in Denmark, and the investment marks a real breakthrough for solar energy in Denmark,” said Laila Mortensen, CEO of Industriens Pension.

“For the first time, Danish pension savings will help accelerate a massive scaling up of subsidy-free green energy production in Denmark. In that sense, our partnership with Industriens Pension marks the beginning of a new era. The next chapter in the green transition will entail accelerating the deployment of renewable energy capacity without state support, together with ensuring critical widespread community ownership and backing. And this is precisely what we are doing with this agreement,” said Rasmus Lildholdt Kjær, CEO of Better Energy.

“This agreement establishes a robust partnership model for how to rapidly scale up the green transition. And this is imperative if Denmark is to have a reasonable chance of achieving its climate targets,” said Mark Augustenborg Ødum, EVP Partnerships in Better Energy.

This is one of the most exciting and empowering solar projects I’ve seen in my 10+ years covering the solar industry. The combination of the fundamental co-ownership of the projects, the massive scale, the fact that it’s all subsidy-free, and the promise for more like this elsewhere make for just one of the most inspiring solar power stories I’ve seen. Furthermore, all of this is happening very far north. This is seriously grey-weather territory. But solar power is competitive nonetheless.

As indicated recently, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has a history of close ties to the fossil fuel industry, has determined that solar power now offers the “cheapest electricity in history.” That was more recently echoed by Lazard as well.

The record-low solar power prices come after a constant drop in solar panel prices across the globe that follow the now totally common reality that as you ramp up production of a technology, costs drop. As I wrote in September, solar PV panels were 12× more expensive in 2010, and 459× more expensive in 1977. The results of this technological learning curve mean that the future of electricity will increasingly be solarized, while the Denmark and Poland projects above show that we can expect a growing flood of large and unexpected solar PV growth in even the greyest of places.

Interestingly, this solar power initiative also arrives as Denmark has decided to end oil & gas exploration in the North Sea.

This also comes not long after Google’s announcement that it, too, is going to be getting a large amount of subsidy-free solar power in Denmark. The 100-megawatt solar power plans seemed like a large announcement, but that just ends up being one-tenth of the Industriens Pension plans. That said, Google has the same partner as Industriens Pension — Better Energy. The solar power developer will build three new solar power parks in Denmark for Google.

Clearly, Better Energy has become quite adept at developing low-cost solar power plants, and convincing major companies and pension funds to choose the firm to build and operate its power plants. We’ll have to keep our eye on BE.

By Zachary Shahan

Source Clean Technica